


The Hype (Is Dead)

by pukeytyler (cherryblur)



Category: Twenty One Pilots
Genre: Alternate Universe - Trench (Album), Brainwashing, DEMA (Twenty One Pilots), Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, M/M, Mind Control Aftermath & Recovery, Psychological Trauma, Rape Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-15
Updated: 2019-03-15
Packaged: 2019-11-18 09:49:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,071
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18118337
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cherryblur/pseuds/pukeytyler
Summary: Tyler is a husk of who he once was.





	The Hype (Is Dead)

**Author's Note:**

> please do not read if you are triggered by any of the tags 
> 
> stay safe.

“You’re safe now, Tyler.” 

He echoes the words like a lost bird.  
“Safe.” 

Josh touches his folded up body and nods again to confirm. 

“Where was I?”

He doesn’t know.  
He doesn’t want to know, frankly, because Tyler is littered with scars, and atop those his skin is kissed with blossoming bruises that spread over his stomach, hips and thighs like violet flowers. 

“Somewhere bad.” Josh decides. 

Tyler lays his head on his bunched knees, cheek pressing against the band-aids stuck on them.  
“Why does it hurt?”  
He breathes slow and Josh counts every gasp of pain within his chest. 

“You were hurt,” He tries to explain.  
“All over.” 

Tyler closes his eyes and opens them wetly. The jacket Josh found him in sits folded beside him. It’s bloody and torn, the yellow tape glued to the fabric peeling and dirty. He’s offered Trench garb, but he declines.

New Trench clothing isn’t the right color.

A hoodie the color of dirty yellow hangs off his bony shoulders because it was the one thing he refused to take off when they found him. 

He’s dirty. He feels dirty. 

“I know why,” He places these thoughts to Josh. 

Josh shakes his head in confusion.  
Tyler stares at his shaved head and wonders if he could do that too. 

“I’m dirty.” 

He says it with chapped lips that crack when they form the words.  
His toes pop when he curls them and he’s burrowed into his bruised knees, eyes poking out like a scared doe. 

“Dirty? Why would you say that?” Josh murmurs. He sits cross-legged, closed off, protective. 

Tyler chews on the sleeve of his stained hoodie. It’s frayed beneath his teeth.  
Tastes like home. He doesn’t know where that is. 

“They just wanted to clean me,” He says in realization. “Didn’t they?”

“No.” Immediate.

Josh stares at him sadly. He looks as if he’d cry, but it’s unsure why. 

“They didn’t clean you, Tyler.”  
He says this so shakily, his mind bringing the memories of just days before, when Tyler was a limping husk of the man he knew. 

He vomited when the camp nurses told him what had happened on that long leave of his. 

He’s so lucky, he reminds himself, swallowing hard at the long puffy scars criss-crossing over Tyler’s cleanly-shaven thighs.  
They couldn’t figure out why they were like that until he was finally unconscious.

“Can I do that?” Tyler breaks the silence, breaks Josh’s horrible remembrance and points to his head with a fingertip wrapped in the yellow tape. He’s tired of getting his hair pulled.

“Of course,” Josh blinks really really fast because his eyes are wet too, Tyler notices. He’s tired of getting his hair pulled. His stomach does a flip when he thinks about it falling to the ground beneath him. 

Gone. 

His stomach hurts. He chews on his sleeve. 

“Do you remember?” Josh asks him questions.  
He likes Josh, because he’s soft and kind and calls back the faintest of memories that make him feel fuzzy and yellow inside. 

Warm yellow. Not dirty hoodie yellow. 

“I remember shows,” Tyler nods. He chews on the edge of the tape around his finger. He chews on a lot.  
It’s a habit he produced in the nowhere he was. 

“We used to watch them all together.” 

Josh doesn’t know if he’s talking about TV shows or the religious practices he was told were mandatory in the place Tyler was. (Dema, is that what he called it?) 

He suspects the latter. 

“I didn’t like them,” Tyler confesses.  
“So I was scolded a lot.” 

“By who?” Josh presses. 

“Him.” 

Josh doesn’t know who He is.

Tyler shifts and winces because his back still hurts. Why does it hurt?  
Josh told him it’s sticky because it’s covered in bandages. 

He furrows his eyebrows in concentration.  
“I didn’t like the show, or-or what they said to us, so he’d take me and..”  
He shakes his head, frowning. “I can’t remember.” 

He swallows, face contorted into a look of concentration. Josh remembers more of the medical report he was given. 

They performed a kit but there were too many to pinpoint in the end. 

Tyler hums a song he remembers trying to play in his home and then questions if that really was his home.  
It felt too cold. 

“I remember my bedroom.”  
He says it through the fabric between his teeth. A string breaks off and he spits it out. 

“I was never alone. It was just..a bed. And a mirror. I had to look at myself a lot. I didn’t like it.” He remembers darkness illuminated by the one glowing crystallized light centered in the room. 

He remembers seeing his own reflection stare horridly back at him while he was pressed into his own mattress. 

That part makes him feel the dirty yellow feeling. 

Josh listens to him intently and looks like he’s been told the worst news of them all. 

“Tyler,” He says it in that really really quiet voice of his, and it’s nice. 

“Were you raped?”  
It’s a question he already knows the answer to. 

Oh. 

Tyler stares at his peeling knuckles and sniffs. He thinks he remembers why his knees hurt so much.  
He’s tired of getting his hair pulled.

He doesn’t say anything. Josh weeps for him. 

He doesn’t want to ask if Tyler remembers getting a back full of whip lashes, red and gaping and infected when left untouched for days, months even. 

Or if he remembers breaking his ankle and nearly losing it from blunt trauma caused by a shackle or chain. 

Tyler is confused, with his big scared eyes desperately searching Josh’s. The cuts scabbed on his face highlight the most precious parts about his beauty. 

He’s so scared. What should he say?  
He doesn’t know what it means. What happened. 

“You’re safe now,” Josh cuts in, and leaves him with that. He can tell it’s too hard. 

Tyler nods and lets out a shaky sigh. “Safe.”  
That’s all he needs to know. He doesn’t want to talk anymore. 

Josh helps him up, carries him outside like a child and lets him see the sunrise for the first time in a year.

Tyler sits in the clean yellow of the dandelions and plucks them with his shaky tape fingers.  
He weaves them into his hair and decides not to cut it. Josh stands behind him like a looming protector. 

Tyler cries.


End file.
